The Labour Party has been trying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes with its mythical $8 billion extra health spend, National Party Health spokesman Dr Jonathan Coleman says.

“The ‘$8 billion more’ health spending argument is smoke and mirrors. They are simply rolling out normal baseline increases and comparing them with a mythical situation of an alternative government that apparently doesn’t add a single dollar to health expenditure for four years. That’s laughable and has simply never happened,” Dr Coleman says.

“The Labour massive extra spending myth also shows up in the amount of new budget money they propose to add each year. Labour is planning to add less in health for each year in the next four years than the National Government has added in the last budget alone.

National new budget operating spend (actual):

2017/18 $879 million

Labour proposed new budget operating spend:

2018/19 $847 million

2019/20 $689 million

2020/21 $826 million

2021/22 $795 million

“The reality is every government makes big increases to the health budget. Of course it’s all about what you do with the money rather than the money itself. And the National Government has an absolute focus on lifting results from the health investments we make.

“The irony is that whether you measure by our respective history of results or just the dollars, when you compare Labour’s proposed plan with National’s track record New Zealanders would receive less from the health sector under Labour.”

PDB

Zedd

Blazer

Coleman exemplifies the party line.We have been in power for 9 years ,but have only just noticed the deficiences in our policies.We promise we will now address them all….honest,just vote us back in..again.

Corky

Like with the education debate both shadow ministers were on the back foot. Hipkins put up a more composed argument, but said, effectively, nothing. Clark said more,( he does), but it seemed to me still a money over substance position.

Health – major is Mental Health. It seems very clear that 90% of problems are drug related. We need to have a bigger more comprehensive ambulance at the bottom of that cliff as lemmings have bolted over the Meth cliff.

Again, I’ll say it. The sheer number of leaders and changes within the Party have meant they’re woefully lacking in detail.

John Schmidt

It annoys the hell out of me that the blowout of the Mental Health segiment of the Health Budget is due to the impact of P upon the idiots who take this or participate with any other substance abuse and then expect me to pickup the cost of this abuse once it all turns to custard.
It equally annoys me that the people pushing this shit also expect me to be tolerant of their legal rights when it comes to catching them and holding them to account for their actions all the while expecting me to pay the social cost.